When I was a kid I was already fascinated with data. I would leaf through the yellow pages and wonder how it helped people connect. I lived that dream and now it's no longer just about connecting, but searching and getting found. This blog is about my work as a "stitcher". There's so much we could do here at home and I am just plain happy whenever I manage to stitch people together.(Oh, BTW everything here is my personal opinion.)

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Google Analytics, a Marketer's Heaven

One of the problems I faced before when I was handling a brand was tracking the success of the marketing campaigns I implemented. Of course, the ultimate measure of success would always be conversion (sales). I used to join countless numbers of trade shows to generate leads and one of the things I had to determine was which show generated the most number of conversions.

The solution? End-to-end tracking of leads to sales. It wasn’t easy since we had to have quite a number of people in the system to encode, tag, milk and analyze the data. And, of course, sales had to cooperate with precise reporting. But at the end of the day I was able to pinpoint which shows were good to join and where efforts had to be put in (imagine finding out that sales practically didn’t touch the leads generated from the shows!).

Advertising online relieves a marketer the pain of tracking data and measuring the efficiency of one’s campaign. I’ve tried different tracking systems prior to using Google Analytics. They were quite fine, but we usually had to do some manual computations to get the exact data we needed.

Ahhh, the wonderful world of data (warm, fuzzy feeling).

Google Analytics basically shows you the following:

Traffic – shows details of your unique number of visitors and pageviews.

Referrals – shows you where your traffic is coming from, whether it is from search or from a link from a website/blog. You’ll also see the top keywords that you are referred from.

Geographic/Location – shows you where your readers are based. Location can be as specific as the barangay or city that the visitor is in.

New vs. Returning – shows you the percentage of visitors who are new and those who are returning for another visit. The console also shows you the average number of visits that visitor has gone back.

And, if you have a Google Adwords campaign ongoing, you will also get to see very detailed data about your campaign, like which keywords or creatives are effective etc.

You can also track the history of a sale. Great isn’t it? Every marketer’s heaven.